The need to land aircraft in low or zero visibility conditions is an unfortunate but necessary event. Changing weather patterns, sudden storms or fog can quickly reduce or obscure a pilot's ability to make a visual landing. In such circumstances pilots may employ synthetic vision systems (SVS) to assist the pilot in locating the runway during landing. However, synthetic vision systems are only as accurate of the database of models that it uses to inform the pilot where the runway is located in a region of interest (ROI) provided by vision sensors. To improve runway location accuracy it is known to use a highly computational, brute force, method known as line fitting. In line fitting, each row and column of pixels from an image sensor are examined in order to attempt to locate straight lines that may be the edges of a runway. Due to the computational complexity of this approach, line fitting can be slow to process sensor data or slow to update the runway location during the final approach. Also, searching for straight lines using brute force edge detection can produce ambiguous results when attempting to resolve the location of the runway.
Accordingly, it is desirable to have a highly accurate yet computationally simple way to locate runways (or other substantially linear objects, e.g., flight decks) during landings in poor weather conditions. In addition, it is desirable to be able to rapidly update runway location throughout the aircraft's final approach at each frame with variable acceptance frame rate throughput. Furthermore, other desirable features and characteristics of the present invention will become apparent from the subsequent detailed description of the invention and the appended claims, taken in conjunction with the accompanying drawings and this background of the invention.